Chinese artist Liu Ding's sculpture "A Girl with a Skull in the Hand" will be shown for the first time at the Quality Street Fine Art Fair in Frankfurt. The life-size dummy representing a young Asian girl is offering the viewer a golden skull with her right hand. The sculpture is concrete in almost every aspect: Both the dummy's hair and its clothes are real, covering a body that also looks authentic, skin-colored, with breasts and pubic hair. In contrast, the pedestal carrying the girl is abstract and not easy to interpret - a shiny-black, organic-looking, eerie structure. The girl with the skull is the first of a series of four sculptures depicting girls that the artist has been working on. He says he was inspired by a painting of Dutch portraitist Frans Hals, a portrait of a young man with a skull at the National Gallery in London. This Baroque vanity-picture can be placed in a long tradition of works of art reminding the transitoriness of all earthly matter. However, it is not this aspect and its implied morality that Liu Ding cares most about: "My work is not so much about the contrast between the vigor of youth and the death and shortness of life ? I am more interested in describing a state of being, which is an almost mechanical longing for the future."

Liu Ding is focused on two subjects. He has dealt with the topic of consumerism and the impact it has had on his home country of China in a series of works titled "Samples from the Transition." At the same time he is interested in the role that art has played in this context. In "Products," which was developed at the Guangzhou Triennial and displayed at L. A. Gallery in the summer of 2006, forty oil-paintings depict nothing but the same motif: two crane-birds against a landscape of mountains and a waterfall, in pink and light-blue shades and framed in gold, produced in shift-work by a kind of combine of professional painters from Dafencun. Pictures like this are usually up for sale at big department stores, and it might well be that this aspect of consumerism also plays a role in the new work. It could be about "want to have" and its consequences; or about "can have" and the global structures of consumerism and consumers' willingness to be seduced that it entails.